Host Erik Fleming interviews historian Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn about his book The Plunder of Black America, tracing how slavery, Jim Crow laws and 20th-century public policies combined to create and sustain the racial wealth gap through individual family stories and economic analysis.
The episode also features reflections on the late Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr., and a discussion of remedies — including reparations and targeted public policy — to begin closing the wealth divide.
00:00:00 --> 00:00:06 Welcome. I'm Erik Fleming, host of A Moment with Erik Fleming, the podcast of our time.
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00:01:15 --> 00:01:20 The following program is hosted by the NBG Podcast Network.
00:02:00 --> 00:02:06 Hello, and welcome to another moment with Erik Fleming. I am your host, Erik Fleming.
00:02:06 --> 00:02:12 And so today is going to be a short day. As far as the podcast goes,
00:02:12 --> 00:02:14 I have one distinct guest.
00:02:14 --> 00:02:19 We're going to be talking about the racial wealth gap in America.
00:02:19 --> 00:02:24 This young man has written a book from a historical perspective.
00:02:24 --> 00:02:28 And I think you'll get a lot out of that interview.
00:02:29 --> 00:02:36 So, yeah, and I'm going to be talking about some reflections I have about the
00:02:36 --> 00:02:39 passing of Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr.
00:02:39 --> 00:02:43 You know, by the time this comes out, a lot of people would have said,
00:02:43 --> 00:02:45 but they needed to say and all that.
00:02:45 --> 00:02:50 But yeah, I've got a couple of things I want to add to that.
00:02:50 --> 00:02:56 But make sure y'all are subscribing or supporting the podcast in any way you
00:02:56 --> 00:02:59 can. You can go to www.momenteric.com to do that.
00:03:00 --> 00:03:05 Again, in these times, the podcast of our time needs your support.
00:03:06 --> 00:03:13 And independent podcasters like me need your support. So please do that if you have not done that.
00:03:13 --> 00:03:17 And without any further ado, let's get this show started. And as always,
00:03:18 --> 00:03:21 we kick it off with a moment of news with Grace G.
00:03:29 --> 00:03:33 Thanks, Erik. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, brother of England's King Charles,
00:03:33 --> 00:03:38 was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office following allegations
00:03:38 --> 00:03:42 that he shared confidential government documents with Jeffrey Epstein during
00:03:42 --> 00:03:44 his tenure as a trade envoy.
00:03:44 --> 00:03:48 Dr. Linda Davis, a Savannah, Georgia elementary school teacher,
00:03:48 --> 00:03:52 was killed when a man fleeing federal immigration officers ran a red light and
00:03:52 --> 00:03:54 crashed into her vehicle near her school.
00:03:55 --> 00:04:00 A federal judge ordered the National Park Service to reinstall a slavery exhibit
00:04:00 --> 00:04:05 at a Philadelphia historic site while the city's lawsuit against the Trump administration's
00:04:05 --> 00:04:07 removal of the display proceeds.
00:04:07 --> 00:04:12 A federal judge has issued a nationwide ruling striking down the administration's
00:04:12 --> 00:04:15 mandatory detention policy for migrants.
00:04:15 --> 00:04:21 Tricia McLaughlin is leaving her role as the lead DHS spokesperson amid criticism
00:04:21 --> 00:04:23 of the agency's communication strategy
00:04:23 --> 00:04:27 and shifting public opinion on the administration's immigration policies.
00:04:27 --> 00:04:33 A judge declared a mistrial for five Stanford University students after a jury
00:04:33 --> 00:04:38 deadlocked on felony charges stemming from a 2024 pro-Palestinian protest at
00:04:38 --> 00:04:40 the school president's office.
00:04:40 --> 00:04:44 A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return
00:04:44 --> 00:04:48 of a Babson College student who was deported to Honduras.
00:04:48 --> 00:04:53 Approximately 100 U.S. military personnel have arrived in Nigeria to provide
00:04:53 --> 00:04:58 training and intelligence support to local forces as part of an expanded operation
00:04:58 --> 00:05:00 against Islamist insurgents.
00:05:00 --> 00:05:06 President Trump's proposed $400 million White House ballroom received approval
00:05:06 --> 00:05:08 from the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.
00:05:09 --> 00:05:14 Federal lawmakers officially renamed the U.S. House Press Gallery in honor of
00:05:14 --> 00:05:16 the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
00:05:17 --> 00:05:22 And Jesse Jackson, the influential civil rights leader, two-time Democratic
00:05:22 --> 00:05:25 presidential candidate, and protege of Dr.
00:05:25 --> 00:05:28 Martin Luther King Jr., died at the age of 84.
00:05:29 --> 00:05:32 I am Grace G., and this has been a Moment of News.
00:05:39 --> 00:05:43 All right. Thank you, Grace, for that moment of news.
00:05:43 --> 00:05:48 And now it is time for my guest, Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn.
00:05:48 --> 00:05:53 Calvin Schermerhorn grew up in Southern Maryland, and after receiving a divinity
00:05:53 --> 00:05:58 degree at Harvard and a PhD at the University of Virginia,
00:05:58 --> 00:06:04 he became a historian of United States slavery and racial economic inequality.
00:06:04 --> 00:06:10 His latest book, The Plunder of Black America, How the Racial Wealth Gap Was
00:06:10 --> 00:06:15 Made, was published in 2025, and that's what we're going to be talking about on the podcast.
00:06:16 --> 00:06:20 So ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a
00:06:20 --> 00:06:24 guest on this podcast, Calvin Schermerhorn.
00:06:36 --> 00:06:41 All right. Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn. How are you doing, sir? You doing good?
00:06:41 --> 00:06:46 Very well. Pleasure to be on with you, Mr. Fleming. Well, it's a pleasure to have you on.
00:06:46 --> 00:06:51 Now, I noticed some people call you Jack. How do we get Jack out of Calvin?
00:06:52 --> 00:06:57 Ah, my parents named me Jack, and in college, adopted this nickname.
00:06:57 --> 00:07:03 It's kind of a silly story, but I went with it. So my professor started calling me that.
00:07:03 --> 00:07:06 I started publishing under Calvin, and it's kind of stuck.
00:07:06 --> 00:07:09 So that's it.
00:07:09 --> 00:07:15 All right. Well, yeah, I know nicknames stick, especially in college and high school.
00:07:16 --> 00:07:18 That's usually when people get their nicknames.
00:07:19 --> 00:07:24 I just thought that was interesting. But I want to get into this discussion
00:07:24 --> 00:07:29 with you about a book that you've written called The Plunder of Black America,
00:07:29 --> 00:07:32 how the racial wealth gap was made.
00:07:32 --> 00:07:38 I think that's a very timely book, and I am really glad that you wrote it.
00:07:38 --> 00:07:45 And before we really get into the meat of that, I do what I call the icebreaker section.
00:07:45 --> 00:07:50 So the first icebreaker is a quote I want you to respond to.
00:07:50 --> 00:07:53 And this is from the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
00:07:53 --> 00:08:00 He said, there is no commitment to economic development. It seems in the black and brown communities.
00:08:01 --> 00:08:05 Some black people want jobs, but many black people want wealth.
00:08:05 --> 00:08:12 They don't go to school to study business administration and finance and banking just to get a job,
00:08:12 --> 00:08:17 but to build banks and to build insurance companies and to have a stake in the
00:08:17 --> 00:08:22 revival of the areas in which they live. What's your response to that quote?
00:08:23 --> 00:08:32 Wisdom from a towering personality, a politician and a leader we sadly lost this week.
00:08:32 --> 00:08:37 And what it does is it cuts to the heart of the matter that this book addresses,
00:08:37 --> 00:08:42 which is that it's not just the value of work, virtue being its own reward.
00:08:42 --> 00:08:46 It's building something that deals with the future, that deals with hope,
00:08:47 --> 00:08:50 that deals with betterment. I mean, it deals with the American dream.
00:08:50 --> 00:08:53 The American dream isn't just a toil and honest labor.
00:08:53 --> 00:08:57 It's to build something for future generations. It's to leave your family,
00:08:57 --> 00:09:00 your community, kids with something better than what you started with.
00:09:01 --> 00:09:05 So that's a keen insight from someone who saw the, you know,
00:09:05 --> 00:09:08 the big picture and communicated. Yeah.
00:09:09 --> 00:09:13 All right. So now the next icebreaker is what we call 20 questions.
00:09:13 --> 00:09:17 So I need you to give me a number between one and 20.
00:09:18 --> 00:09:25 Fifteen. All right. When you think about the challenges our country faces, what gives you hope?
00:09:26 --> 00:09:31 It's the resiliency and it's the creativity of the rising generation,
00:09:32 --> 00:09:38 the resiliency to kind of deal with what we collectively in our generation have
00:09:38 --> 00:09:41 placed upon their shoulders. And also to think differently.
00:09:42 --> 00:09:47 Think forward, think sideways, think about the patterns that can be broken,
00:09:48 --> 00:09:50 the possibilities that they can reach.
00:09:51 --> 00:09:57 When I give talks to church groups and others, I often end on a kind of an unhopeful note.
00:09:57 --> 00:10:00 And I've been told in the past, well, why do you end on that unhopeful note?
00:10:01 --> 00:10:04 And I say, well, that's where the evidence seems to go.
00:10:04 --> 00:10:10 But with kids, you know, a 15-year-old and a 13-year-old, I don't think that's
00:10:10 --> 00:10:11 tenable or sustainable.
00:10:11 --> 00:10:15 We can't just say, well, based on the past evidence, we're just going to go
00:10:15 --> 00:10:19 over the cliff or we're going to go into the, you know, hit the rocky shoals.
00:10:19 --> 00:10:22 How about we think about steering the ship in a different direction?
00:10:22 --> 00:10:24 And so that's why I responded that way. Yeah.
00:10:25 --> 00:10:28 All right. So what motivated you to write this book?
00:10:29 --> 00:10:34 I was trained as an academic, but also grew up in a place that was trying very
00:10:34 --> 00:10:38 hard to forget its racist past, its past of enslavement.
00:10:39 --> 00:10:45 I'd pass tobacco fields on the way to elementary school and see African-American workers there.
00:10:45 --> 00:10:50 I would go, you know, do a project in high school to see how those,
00:10:50 --> 00:10:51 the tobacco is being stemmed.
00:10:51 --> 00:10:55 There were black workers in those barns. Now they're being replaced by migrant
00:10:55 --> 00:11:00 workers, people who were speaking Spanish and often and mine as a first language.
00:11:00 --> 00:11:05 And so as I learned about the history of the South, the history of enslavement,
00:11:05 --> 00:11:09 I was publishing on these issues, I kept running into this curious response
00:11:09 --> 00:11:12 that is, well and good, you're studying slavery.
00:11:12 --> 00:11:17 You're looking at this institution that was maybe the original sin of the American
00:11:17 --> 00:11:23 Republic, that it was something that we had to work as a nation to get rid of,
00:11:23 --> 00:11:25 to constitutionally exclude by the 13th Amendment.
00:11:26 --> 00:11:33 And I noticed that the more Or that response led to another kind of interesting,
00:11:33 --> 00:11:39 you know, sort of mental leap, which was that once you get rid of slavery,
00:11:39 --> 00:11:43 well, the laws of economics and maybe the politics of equality are going to
00:11:43 --> 00:11:49 work their way through the American system so that by maybe not in 1870,
00:11:49 --> 00:11:53 but maybe by 1970, you'd have something approaching equality.
00:11:53 --> 00:11:55 That just didn't happen.
00:11:56 --> 00:11:57 We'd look at things like, or
00:11:57 --> 00:12:00 I'd look at things like land ownership among formerly enslaved Virginians.
00:12:00 --> 00:12:04 And sure enough, by 1900, you know, a high proportion of black households in
00:12:04 --> 00:12:06 Virginia owned their own property, owned their own land.
00:12:07 --> 00:12:09 And a lot of historians would say, well, look at that. You know,
00:12:09 --> 00:12:11 there you have this equalizing tendency.
00:12:12 --> 00:12:16 But then you start to read political economy, especially black political economy
00:12:16 --> 00:12:18 by scholars like William A.
00:12:18 --> 00:12:22 Sandy Darity and Derek Hamilton, who are finding these staggering,
00:12:22 --> 00:12:26 staggering wealth inequalities that persist and grew.
00:12:27 --> 00:12:31 They grew at the same time the United States became more wealthy than any time
00:12:31 --> 00:12:33 before, probably afterwards.
00:12:34 --> 00:12:39 And so as I was putting these dots together, I'm thinking, what's the big story here?
00:12:39 --> 00:12:44 How is it that we can talk in one breath about equality, the end of enslavement,
00:12:44 --> 00:12:47 the rise of civil rights, a second American founding,
00:12:48 --> 00:12:54 to use the formulation of many historians, and then look around and see a staggering
00:12:54 --> 00:12:57 and persistent wealth inequality. How does that work together?
00:12:58 --> 00:13:02 And so the book attempts to go back over 400 years and look at the patterns
00:13:02 --> 00:13:07 that established that and to try and understand this process historically.
00:13:08 --> 00:13:14 So part of what that involved is looking at individual households and generations.
00:13:15 --> 00:13:17 So that we don't just isolate one variable.
00:13:17 --> 00:13:22 We can't just throw up a banner headline saying, well, if inequality needs to
00:13:22 --> 00:13:26 close, we need to address education, or the wealth gap is all about homeownership.
00:13:27 --> 00:13:30 Or, well, we need to address inequities in credit reporting,
00:13:30 --> 00:13:32 or we need to end job discrimination.
00:13:33 --> 00:13:37 Yes, it's all of these, but I wanted to work on a history that showed how all
00:13:37 --> 00:13:45 of these factors work together to be mutually reinforcing constraints on uplift over the generations.
00:13:45 --> 00:13:48 Thinking about the quote from Jesse Jackson. Yeah.
00:13:49 --> 00:13:55 So like you said, you divided the book into stories about African-American individuals
00:13:55 --> 00:13:59 and families and how their experiences explain the racial wealth gap.
00:13:59 --> 00:14:04 So let's start with one of George Washington's slaves, Morris,
00:14:05 --> 00:14:12 and how the theft of his income contributed to the structural feature of the colonial economy.
00:14:13 --> 00:14:17 Sure. So let's start with Morris. I couldn't find his last name.
00:14:18 --> 00:14:21 This is someone whom George Washington enslaved for decades.
00:14:21 --> 00:14:27 He called one of his farms on the Mount Vernon plantation complex Morris's.
00:14:27 --> 00:14:29 Never recorded his last name.
00:14:29 --> 00:14:36 So to go back into Morris's life, he was born in the tidewater of Virginia, I think around 1729.
00:14:36 --> 00:14:45 He grew up the property of John Custis IV. How did that make him George Washington's bondsman?
00:14:45 --> 00:14:52 Well, Custis' son, Daniel Park Custis, married a young Martha Dandridge.
00:14:53 --> 00:14:58 Martha Dandridge was a teenager at the time. They had four children.
00:14:58 --> 00:15:03 Daniel Park Custis died in his 40s. Martha remarried George Washington.
00:15:03 --> 00:15:10 Martha was the wealthiest widow in Virginia at the time, and Morris was enslaved. to her estate.
00:15:11 --> 00:15:17 So that is to her and her surviving children. So Morris grew up in the Tidewater, Virginia.
00:15:17 --> 00:15:22 And I think if he was free, he would have raced ahead of his contemporaries.
00:15:22 --> 00:15:26 By all accounts, he was smart, ingenious, clever.
00:15:26 --> 00:15:29 He had leadership capacity and he knew his craft very well.
00:15:30 --> 00:15:35 And so he was an expert carpenter at a time when there was quite a skills premium.
00:15:35 --> 00:15:39 If you were a free white carpenter, you could live what we'd call a comfortable
00:15:39 --> 00:15:41 middle-class existence.
00:15:41 --> 00:15:48 He'd probably own his own farm, own his own shop, you know, he'd provide for his children.
00:15:48 --> 00:15:52 So that didn't happen. When George and Martha married in 1759,
00:15:53 --> 00:15:56 George decided he was going to renovate his family property,
00:15:57 --> 00:16:04 Mount Vernon, into an elegant mansion befitting a kind of aristocrat from Virginia.
00:16:05 --> 00:16:09 And he had Morris do that. And if you go to Mount Vernon today,
00:16:09 --> 00:16:12 they just did a big reno on the main house.
00:16:12 --> 00:16:18 You could see some of the exposed timber work that Morris probably crafted using his skills.
00:16:18 --> 00:16:24 So George Washington, we know him as the founder of the United States,
00:16:24 --> 00:16:27 Continental Army leader, president, etc.
00:16:27 --> 00:16:31 He was first and foremost an agricultural innovator.
00:16:31 --> 00:16:36 He read British agricultural literature. He worked to turn Mount Vernon from
00:16:36 --> 00:16:41 a tobacco farm that was maybe no different than any other tobacco farm on the
00:16:41 --> 00:16:47 Potomac River to an integrated agricultural complex that had 60 crop varieties,
00:16:47 --> 00:16:51 was adding value to products through grist mills,
00:16:51 --> 00:16:54 through milling, through distilling.
00:16:54 --> 00:17:01 The Virginia whiskey industry is now kind of firmly on the back of George Washington, the distiller.
00:17:01 --> 00:17:04 And he needed leadership and he needed talent.
00:17:04 --> 00:17:10 Now, George Washington tried to do this through hired white overseers,
00:17:10 --> 00:17:12 but it pretty much failed.
00:17:12 --> 00:17:16 These guys would come in, steal his property, misdirect, maybe not,
00:17:16 --> 00:17:22 you know, pay half attention to the concerns on the farm, and then go leave for their own property.
00:17:22 --> 00:17:26 Their own household, their own ends. They didn't want to work for Washington.
00:17:27 --> 00:17:29 They wanted their own plantation. Well and good.
00:17:30 --> 00:17:35 So after decades of this, Washington turned to Morris and he said,
00:17:35 --> 00:17:37 okay, you have been a leader.
00:17:37 --> 00:17:41 I'm imagining this conversation in the ranks, in this carpentry team.
00:17:42 --> 00:17:46 Now I want you to run Doug Run Farm. I want you to manage that property.
00:17:46 --> 00:17:49 And Morris, well, he's enslaved, so what can he do, right?
00:17:50 --> 00:17:54 No, sir, thank you. I would rather be free and manage my own farm like the series
00:17:54 --> 00:17:56 of overseers I'm taking over from.
00:17:56 --> 00:18:02 So Washington had it. He had him, you know, he had a kind of an awful bargain.
00:18:03 --> 00:18:06 He said, Morris, I know you're married to Hannah. I don't really let married
00:18:06 --> 00:18:08 people live together. That's not efficient.
00:18:08 --> 00:18:11 That doesn't, you know, we're down to the benefit of my plantation.
00:18:11 --> 00:18:17 But if you do superintend Dogron Farm, you and Hannah and live together in an old farmhouse.
00:18:17 --> 00:18:22 So that's what Morris did for 20 years or so he managed his farm.
00:18:23 --> 00:18:27 And it doesn't sound like a hard, you know, hatch to manage at first,
00:18:27 --> 00:18:31 but he managed through adversity, through natural disasters,
00:18:31 --> 00:18:33 through floods, through hot summers.
00:18:33 --> 00:18:37 He had to reclaim enslaved workers who ran away.
00:18:37 --> 00:18:42 People whose feet were frostbitten, people who were forced to work through pregnancy
00:18:42 --> 00:18:47 and early childbirth, people who were just forced to work, right, relentlessly.
00:18:47 --> 00:18:51 George Washington was a micromanager. He'd take a ride around Mount Vernon to
00:18:51 --> 00:18:53 make sure his orders were being carried out.
00:18:54 --> 00:18:57 And he was fairly relentless in that regard.
00:18:57 --> 00:19:01 And there are stories that circulate that, oh, George Washington was a kind
00:19:01 --> 00:19:05 and, you know, forbearing master, but come on, right?
00:19:05 --> 00:19:10 We can see what's happening here. So Morris responded as best he could.
00:19:10 --> 00:19:15 He made a go of Dobrun Farm, which Washington over time called Morris's.
00:19:15 --> 00:19:19 And in order to encourage him, Washington paid him a stipend,
00:19:19 --> 00:19:25 which was about one-tenth what he would pay an overseer, a hired overseer.
00:19:25 --> 00:19:28 And so the farm became a success.
00:19:28 --> 00:19:33 Morris and Hannah lived together for many seasons. And by the time the War of
00:19:33 --> 00:19:38 Independence came, hard times hit Mount Vernon, just like they hit the rest of America.
00:19:39 --> 00:19:45 Americans lost about 30% of their incomes during the revolution and shortly afterward.
00:19:46 --> 00:19:51 You know, by that time, Morris and Hannah were in their 50s, 40s and 50s.
00:19:51 --> 00:19:53 You know, what were they going to do? Run away to the British.
00:19:53 --> 00:19:55 Some people did, but they were promptly returned.
00:19:56 --> 00:20:02 And so the story shows how over a lifetime, Washington's enterprise,
00:20:02 --> 00:20:08 it was suck the income potential, suck the potential wealth out of Morris and
00:20:08 --> 00:20:10 Hannah and everybody like that.
00:20:10 --> 00:20:17 And were it not for that constraint, that enslavement, we can imagine this couple
00:20:17 --> 00:20:25 being landowners, citizens, people who are active in shaping the Commonwealth of Virginia.
00:20:25 --> 00:20:31 That didn't happen. And we make a lot about George Washington setting 123 people
00:20:31 --> 00:20:35 free in his will after Martha passed away in 1802.
00:20:36 --> 00:20:42 But even that didn't really help Hannah, who by that time was a widow of Morris
00:20:42 --> 00:20:45 and may have gone free, probably did.
00:20:45 --> 00:20:50 But at that time, she was a burden on others and didn't have much of a life of her own.
00:20:50 --> 00:20:54 And so we see these stories again and again, this potential that's harnessed,
00:20:55 --> 00:20:59 this wealth generating potential that's harnessed to the greater wealth of someone
00:20:59 --> 00:21:04 like George Washington, who left every single acre of his property to his white
00:21:04 --> 00:21:07 heirs, even though he had no natural children of his own.
00:21:07 --> 00:21:14 They were the offspring, the grandchildren of Martha and John Park Custis.
00:21:15 --> 00:21:20 Yeah, because it was something you said in the book that somebody of Morris'
00:21:21 --> 00:21:23 skill set probably would have made.
00:21:24 --> 00:21:30 In their lifetime, about 9 pounds sterling, which doesn't sound like a whole
00:21:30 --> 00:21:34 lot, but we're talking about the 1700s.
00:21:34 --> 00:21:43 So that would have put him, like you said, in an upper middle class bracket during that time.
00:21:43 --> 00:21:48 The Rivers family, they lived in an era W.E.B.
00:21:48 --> 00:21:53 Du Bois described as a moment when the slave went free, stood a brief moment
00:21:53 --> 00:21:57 in the sun and then moved back again towards slavery.
00:21:57 --> 00:22:02 Talk about the impact of Jim Crow era on Blackwell.
00:22:03 --> 00:22:09 Yes, this was in many ways one of the most heartbreaking chapters because it
00:22:09 --> 00:22:14 shows the possibilities for freedom after emancipation,
00:22:14 --> 00:22:21 during Reconstruction, and it shows how very quietly, the forces of plunder gathered.
00:22:21 --> 00:22:25 And so this is the Rivers family of South Carolina.
00:22:25 --> 00:22:29 They were, you know, if you want to say, let's put them on an ethnographic map.
00:22:29 --> 00:22:33 They may not have called themselves Gullah people, but they were Gullah.
00:22:33 --> 00:22:38 So they were descended from West African forced migrants, enslaved people brought
00:22:38 --> 00:22:42 over in the 18th century to work South Carolina rice plantations.
00:22:43 --> 00:22:47 And there are Rivers families in Beaufort County, South Carolina.
00:22:48 --> 00:22:52 This is the branch of the Rivers family in Berkeley County, South Carolina,
00:22:52 --> 00:22:53 just north of Charleston.
00:22:54 --> 00:23:00 So they were enslaved, freed, you know, by the 13th Amendment.
00:23:00 --> 00:23:03 And here's the critical thing.
00:23:03 --> 00:23:07 By 1868, South Carolina, which had
00:23:07 --> 00:23:12 a black majority, was one of the most progressive states in the country.
00:23:12 --> 00:23:17 South Carolina instituted public education that, yes, was segregated.
00:23:17 --> 00:23:24 But by the early 1870s, they were spending almost equal dollars per student to go to school.
00:23:24 --> 00:23:28 So Hector Rivers went to school. He learned how to read and write.
00:23:28 --> 00:23:36 He began to distinguish himself from other farmers and that he was successful. He generated a surplus.
00:23:37 --> 00:23:41 South Carolina had what they called a land commission, which divided up old
00:23:41 --> 00:23:46 plantations and sold it off in family-sized parcels and gave them mortgage credit.
00:23:47 --> 00:23:50 The Freedman's Bank, the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company was a savings bank.
00:23:51 --> 00:23:54 It didn't issue mortgages. Most banks at the time did not issue mortgages.
00:23:55 --> 00:23:59 In fact, in the national banking era, to be a little bit wonky,
00:23:59 --> 00:24:02 national banks did not give retail loans.
00:24:02 --> 00:24:06 If you wanted free land, if you wanted reduced price land, you got to go get
00:24:06 --> 00:24:09 up in some of that homesteading land.
00:24:09 --> 00:24:15 That required you to move out of state. So in the Sea Islands of South Carolina,
00:24:15 --> 00:24:22 the Rivers family managed to get a little over 100 acres of property in a place
00:24:22 --> 00:24:24 where there's lots of mosquitoes,
00:24:24 --> 00:24:31 there's lots of alligators and pests, but they're able to make a living as a small farming family.
00:24:31 --> 00:24:38 So what happens? In the 1880s, right after South Carolina is so-called redeemed
00:24:38 --> 00:24:41 by white conservatives, they start passing laws.
00:24:41 --> 00:24:48 The laws seem to be colorblind at first, but they pass something called an eight ballot box measure.
00:24:48 --> 00:24:53 That means that for each of the eight offices that you went to the polls to
00:24:53 --> 00:24:57 elect, you had to put the right ballot in the right box. And to do that, you needed to read.
00:24:58 --> 00:25:03 So that was no problem for Hector Rivers, he could do that, but his children
00:25:03 --> 00:25:04 may not have been able to do that.
00:25:05 --> 00:25:10 So there was this issue with literacy. South Carolina said, well,
00:25:10 --> 00:25:12 that doesn't disenfranchise Black people enough.
00:25:12 --> 00:25:18 Let's pass a measure redistricting South Carolina to group Black voters like
00:25:18 --> 00:25:21 those in Berkeley County, which was about 80% African-American,
00:25:21 --> 00:25:25 in their own gerrymandered district, so that's going to dilute the Black vote
00:25:25 --> 00:25:27 and swing the legislature back
00:25:27 --> 00:25:32 to a white minority rule, which they did successfully also in the 1880s.
00:25:32 --> 00:25:38 So step by step, they're reversing the advancements of Reconstruction.
00:25:39 --> 00:25:43 And by 1895, South Carolina decides we just need a new constitution because
00:25:43 --> 00:25:49 it's tiresome passing all these ad hoc rules to disenfranchise and demote black people.
00:25:49 --> 00:25:53 Let's just pass a constitution that does it all in one fell swoop.
00:25:53 --> 00:25:56 And this is exactly what happened.
00:25:56 --> 00:26:04 So by 1900, by 1908, a very small proportion of African-Americans in South Carolina are voting.
00:26:04 --> 00:26:11 And this comes with another problem, which is how do you maintain hold on your property?
00:26:11 --> 00:26:16 You and I know that if we don't pay our property taxes, if we don't do what
00:26:16 --> 00:26:20 we need to do to maintain our property holdings, the state will come and take
00:26:20 --> 00:26:24 it, whether it's an auto, whether it's real property, what have you.
00:26:25 --> 00:26:31 So Gullah people, you know, they could say, well, okay, we're losing the courts,
00:26:31 --> 00:26:33 we're losing the votes, we're not losing our family.
00:26:33 --> 00:26:38 And so the Rivers family held on to a place they were now calling Pinefield
00:26:38 --> 00:26:43 through parceling it down in family allotments.
00:26:43 --> 00:26:48 Okay, so this son, this daughter, this couple gets this part of the family property
00:26:48 --> 00:26:52 and this son, this daughter, this couple gets another part of the family property.
00:26:53 --> 00:26:57 Another thing's happening at the same time, which is that truck farming or commercial
00:26:57 --> 00:27:01 farming is coming in and changing the agriculture in coastal South Carolina.
00:27:02 --> 00:27:06 So instead of growing, you know, wheat and corn, or you're growing some amount
00:27:06 --> 00:27:10 of rice or cotton, now the big market is for veggies, which you could put on
00:27:10 --> 00:27:13 a train, send up to New York City, it's going to be a lot more profitable,
00:27:13 --> 00:27:16 except big farming companies are coming in, buying up the land,
00:27:17 --> 00:27:18 evicting the migrant workers, etc.
00:27:18 --> 00:27:25 So if we go down to the 1970s and 80s now, we have third, fourth,
00:27:25 --> 00:27:29 fifth generation descendants of Hector Rivers occupying this land.
00:27:29 --> 00:27:33 They've shipped it away from farming. They're taking the ferry to Charleston
00:27:33 --> 00:27:40 to work in the Navy yard, to work in a fertilizer factory, to do something other than farming.
00:27:41 --> 00:27:46 So what happens by the 1990s is Charleston's growing.
00:27:47 --> 00:27:51 Suddenly, Pinefield looks like it's going to make a good suburban development.
00:27:51 --> 00:27:56 And real estate, white real estate developers get interested in what is now
00:27:56 --> 00:27:58 called heirs' property.
00:27:58 --> 00:28:03 So heirs' property is this common phenomenon that happens in different places
00:28:03 --> 00:28:10 in the South under different frameworks of law, but that designates family property
00:28:10 --> 00:28:12 that's been passed down without clear title.
00:28:12 --> 00:28:20 So by the 1990s, an intrepid lawyer gets one of the river's descendants to sue.
00:28:20 --> 00:28:24 And under South Carolina law at the time, if that descendant decides that she's
00:28:24 --> 00:28:29 going to sell her fractionalized ownership of that piece of pine field,
00:28:29 --> 00:28:31 it forces the settlement of all of it.
00:28:32 --> 00:28:35 Now, this does two things to this nest egg.
00:28:35 --> 00:28:40 It cheapens it because if you're selling property without a clear title,
00:28:40 --> 00:28:43 it's going to be way below market value.
00:28:43 --> 00:28:48 And the other part, which scholars have picked up on, property in black hands
00:28:48 --> 00:28:53 is lower valued, even though next week it may be in white hands,
00:28:53 --> 00:28:54 it's going to be higher value.
00:28:54 --> 00:28:58 So this happened to the Rivers family, so that by the year 2000,
00:28:59 --> 00:29:02 the Rivers descendants had lost their family.
00:29:04 --> 00:29:07 Legacy. They'd lost Pinefield to developers.
00:29:08 --> 00:29:13 And this came in the tragedy of local police.
00:29:14 --> 00:29:16 Some of the local sheriffs said, I can't, in good conscience,
00:29:17 --> 00:29:21 evict people from their family land, even though I have a court order to do so.
00:29:21 --> 00:29:24 And the court said, no, unmistakably move them.
00:29:24 --> 00:29:27 So they moved people, they moved children, they moved widows,
00:29:27 --> 00:29:31 they moved people, they moved trailers, you know, mobile homes off this land,
00:29:31 --> 00:29:36 off this Pinefield site, and almost immediately the county came in,
00:29:36 --> 00:29:38 they built the sewers, they built the roads.
00:29:39 --> 00:29:43 There had already been an automobile bridge that linked this part of Berkeley
00:29:43 --> 00:29:46 County to the Charleston metro area.
00:29:46 --> 00:29:51 And right before the book went to publication, I looked on one of those,
00:29:51 --> 00:29:55 you know, real estate websites, and there's Pinefield subdivided into these
00:29:55 --> 00:30:01 sumptuous multi-acre properties with huge single-family housing,
00:30:01 --> 00:30:03 lanai, pools, et cetera.
00:30:03 --> 00:30:06 These properties are going for $2 million of fees.
00:30:07 --> 00:30:10 So let's step back and say, well, how did that happen?
00:30:10 --> 00:30:16 And you can see through the steps here, the processes that connected something
00:30:16 --> 00:30:21 that seems as benign as just another real estate listing to the quote you started with.
00:30:22 --> 00:30:25 From W.E.B. Du Bois. And how does this happen?
00:30:25 --> 00:30:31 How does a family like the Rivers get plundered of their ancestral property?
00:30:32 --> 00:30:39 Yeah. All right. So now, just so the listeners will know, there's multiple stories
00:30:39 --> 00:30:40 of different individuals and
00:30:40 --> 00:30:44 families in the book, but I only wanted to cover three because of time.
00:30:44 --> 00:30:48 So the Prathers are the final story in the book.
00:30:48 --> 00:30:53 Discuss how the public policies of the latter 20th century contributed to the
00:30:53 --> 00:30:56 struggles of families like the Prithers.
00:30:57 --> 00:31:06 Yeah, so this is the concluding chapter, and it revolves around a family who grew up,
00:31:06 --> 00:31:14 descended from those people whom Georgetown College in 1838 sold off to save the institution.
00:31:15 --> 00:31:19 So some of your listeners may have read Rachel Swarns' beautiful book,
00:31:19 --> 00:31:24 The 272. So in 1838, Georgetown College was hitting hard times,
00:31:24 --> 00:31:28 and they decided to sell off some of the college's assets. Those were human assets.
00:31:28 --> 00:31:32 Those were African Americans living in Prince George's in Maryland,
00:31:33 --> 00:31:35 in St. Mary's County, Maryland.
00:31:35 --> 00:31:40 They sold 138 individuals to Louisiana sugar planters.
00:31:41 --> 00:31:46 And that's how Rochelle Sanders Prater's ancestors ended up in Iberville Parish, Louisiana.
00:31:46 --> 00:31:50 So after you know
00:31:50 --> 00:31:53 after enslavement emancipation they picked
00:31:53 --> 00:31:56 up right that it's this kind of the same story as
00:31:56 --> 00:31:59 the rivers family right you start with zero wealth
00:31:59 --> 00:32:05 you get no back wages from slavery you get no recompense for having missed out
00:32:05 --> 00:32:10 on generations of education and exploitation but this family works their way
00:32:10 --> 00:32:17 up so south so sorry this is louisiana baton rouge area It's the Louisiana Sugar Bowl,
00:32:17 --> 00:32:20 and they go from being sugar workers to timber workers.
00:32:20 --> 00:32:27 This comes with its own dangers and hazards. Rochelle's uncle died in a logging accident.
00:32:27 --> 00:32:30 Relative died in a logging accident. I think it actually is her grandfather.
00:32:31 --> 00:32:35 So they're growing up. It's kind of scraping by.
00:32:36 --> 00:32:42 In the Jim Crow era, you have two economies in Merrington, Louisiana, and Iberville Parish.
00:32:42 --> 00:32:45 There's a white-run economy and a black-run economy.
00:32:45 --> 00:32:50 And so Rochelle Sanders Prater grew up, born in 1960, grew up in this environment,
00:32:50 --> 00:32:56 and was, as she describes in the interviews, a child of integration.
00:32:57 --> 00:33:01 So her parents encouraged their kids to go to school, earn those degrees.
00:33:01 --> 00:33:05 She had a love of engineering, so she got an engineering degree.
00:33:05 --> 00:33:10 And faced the kinds of discrimination that are very quiet.
00:33:10 --> 00:33:14 Her sister also earned an engineering degree, wanted to stay near Iberville
00:33:14 --> 00:33:20 and stay near her family, but went up and down the levee looking for a job with
00:33:20 --> 00:33:25 an engineering degree, looking for a job at one of the petrochemical companies.
00:33:25 --> 00:33:30 And they just laughed at her. We're not hiring Black people and certainly not Black women.
00:33:30 --> 00:33:34 She ended up getting an advanced degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic and working
00:33:34 --> 00:33:38 for General Electric Aerospace in the Cincinnati area.
00:33:38 --> 00:33:42 So Rochelle follows her dream to an engineering degree.
00:33:43 --> 00:33:49 Her husband was working as a prison guard at the time, a corrections officer, right?
00:33:49 --> 00:33:53 And so he saw up close what's happening in Louisiana, which is that a vast,
00:33:53 --> 00:34:00 disproportionate fraction of the population, Black men are being incarcerated.
00:34:00 --> 00:34:05 Or, you know, for what? You know, that's another podcast, right?
00:34:05 --> 00:34:08 I probably don't need to expand too much on this.
00:34:08 --> 00:34:11 So they decide we're going to take a ticket out of Louisiana.
00:34:11 --> 00:34:15 We don't want to, but Rochelle took a job with...
00:34:18 --> 00:34:22 I'm blanking on the name, Aerospace Company in Long Beach, California.
00:34:24 --> 00:34:29 McDonald Douglas, thank you. And moved out there in the late 80s.
00:34:29 --> 00:34:33 And this should have been a ticket to prosperity.
00:34:33 --> 00:34:39 But she's moving to the LA metro area, which itself has been formed through
00:34:39 --> 00:34:43 generations of discriminatory practices, redlining, etc.
00:34:43 --> 00:34:49 The aerospace industry at the time was booming, especially the defense aerospace industry.
00:34:49 --> 00:34:55 So she's landing in Long Beach. She's working on one of the most advanced transport
00:34:55 --> 00:35:00 planes of the time, the C-17 Strato.
00:35:00 --> 00:35:05 I'm going to blank on the name of this as well. If you see a jet-powered Air
00:35:05 --> 00:35:08 Force transport plane, it's probably one of these, even though they don't make
00:35:08 --> 00:35:10 them anymore. So the C-17 project.
00:35:10 --> 00:35:14 So she lands there and finds it's very hard. First of all, because she's a black
00:35:14 --> 00:35:17 woman, she has a pay differential, a disadvantage.
00:35:17 --> 00:35:24 The company, McDonnell Douglas, was able to recruit very talented people with substandard wages.
00:35:24 --> 00:35:28 And then the L.A. housing market was priced them out. So they're renting.
00:35:28 --> 00:35:33 It's a long commute. her husband had to kind of pivot from being a corrections
00:35:33 --> 00:35:38 officer to a courier at a time before cell phones and DoorDash and all that.
00:35:38 --> 00:35:44 So they're doing okay. But she faces persistent discrimination at this aerospace company.
00:35:44 --> 00:35:49 She shifts to another aerospace company, and she's working on the B-2 stealth
00:35:49 --> 00:35:58 bomber up in one of these high security production facilities north of Los Angeles.
00:35:58 --> 00:36:04 So, one day, it's in an automobile accident, 1990, suffers a head injury,
00:36:05 --> 00:36:06 and her career essentially ends.
00:36:07 --> 00:36:12 And this is where the policy kind of the policy story catches up with the success
00:36:12 --> 00:36:17 story of someone who made it, you know, into aerospace with an engineering degree
00:36:17 --> 00:36:21 is working on some of the most advanced aircraft of our era.
00:36:22 --> 00:36:27 And because Social Security was not set up to serve African-Americans,
00:36:27 --> 00:36:32 she has no way of getting an on-ramp back into her career.
00:36:32 --> 00:36:37 She eventually gets Social Security disability, but not for the accident itself,
00:36:37 --> 00:36:42 but for the depression, kind of the consequences of that.
00:36:42 --> 00:36:45 So her family is not able to go back into this industry.
00:36:45 --> 00:36:52 She is forced to move to near where her sister is in Cincinnati and build her life back up again.
00:36:52 --> 00:36:56 So it's a story of adversity and disability. And in a larger frame,
00:36:56 --> 00:37:01 it's a story of second chances that Black Americans don't get and don't get by design.
00:37:01 --> 00:37:08 In the Reagan era, there was all kinds of moves to dismantle any kind of federal
00:37:08 --> 00:37:13 safety net, to get rid of civil rights regulations, get rid of civil rights laws.
00:37:13 --> 00:37:19 I mentioned in the book, and this is before the last year, John Roberts,
00:37:19 --> 00:37:21 now Chief Justice of the U.S.
00:37:21 --> 00:37:25 Supreme Court, got a start in the Reagan White House trying to work against
00:37:25 --> 00:37:27 civil rights regulations and civil
00:37:27 --> 00:37:32 rights legislation. And you can see how extremely successful the U.S.
00:37:32 --> 00:37:38 Supreme Court has been in the last 15 or so years in rolling back the Civil
00:37:38 --> 00:37:43 Rights Revolution, gutting the Civil Rights Acts, gutting the Voting Rights
00:37:43 --> 00:37:45 Act of 1965 in particular.
00:37:45 --> 00:37:49 And at every turn, you know, trying to turn the clock back.
00:37:49 --> 00:37:55 But the story of the Praetor family Doesn't end there They pick themselves back
00:37:55 --> 00:38:01 up They fight the good fight for equality But it's the story of Of.
00:38:02 --> 00:38:08 How structures that are meant to support and help American families thrive work
00:38:08 --> 00:38:14 in reverse in many cases when African-American families are making those claims.
00:38:15 --> 00:38:20 So, you know, I don't want to tell too much of Rochelle Sanders Prater's story
00:38:20 --> 00:38:26 because she is one of the executive directors of the Georgetown 272 Project,
00:38:26 --> 00:38:29 very active in making that history well known.
00:38:29 --> 00:38:35 But here's the point of the story is to show what is the trajectory there.
00:38:35 --> 00:38:38 We like to think of ourselves or like to think of America as a place of,
00:38:39 --> 00:38:45 you know, if you bootstrap your way up, you know, there's no upward limitations.
00:38:45 --> 00:38:51 But hidden in the weeds of that are a series of interlocking disadvantages.
00:38:51 --> 00:38:57 And those that we face today include things as benign or seemingly neutral as a credit score.
00:38:57 --> 00:39:03 Why is it that in 1989, you know, the Fair Isaac Company or FICO decided to
00:39:03 --> 00:39:07 make credit scores in such a way that most of our credit scores determined not
00:39:07 --> 00:39:12 by what we've done, but by what our parents were able to do, Our grandparents,
00:39:12 --> 00:39:15 the economic circumstances we're born into.
00:39:16 --> 00:39:23 So when you think about these things or think about the hidden tax on,
00:39:23 --> 00:39:26 let's say, African-American home ownership, vehicle ownership,
00:39:27 --> 00:39:33 education, then we can start to understand why these gaps are so persistent over so much time.
00:39:34 --> 00:39:37 And if I haven't, if I'm talking too much, let me know.
00:39:38 --> 00:39:42 But I just wanted to add one point that as the book reached its conclusion,
00:39:42 --> 00:39:47 it relied on the Federal Reserve's survey of consumer finance.
00:39:48 --> 00:39:50 This every once every three years, the Fed does a survey.
00:39:51 --> 00:39:55 And one of the outcomes of that is to look at racial wealth and income gaps.
00:39:56 --> 00:40:03 And one of the things that should be something to be part of a public policy
00:40:03 --> 00:40:09 discussion is that in 2022, when the Fed did the last survey or published the last survey,
00:40:09 --> 00:40:12 they did one in 2025, should be out later this year,
00:40:12 --> 00:40:18 they found that black households had about 16 cents on the dollar compared to white households.
00:40:18 --> 00:40:23 That is, I think, a staggering measure of inequality and one that should be
00:40:23 --> 00:40:25 at the forefront of our public policy discussion.
00:40:26 --> 00:40:31 Yeah. So that leads to my last question is really going to be two questions in one.
00:40:31 --> 00:40:34 There is a book called 15 Cents on the Dollar.
00:40:35 --> 00:40:41 And according to that book, if the black-white, it says if the black-white wealth
00:40:41 --> 00:40:45 ratio increases at the pace it did from 2019 to 2022,
00:40:45 --> 00:40:53 it would reach one-to-one ratio in 91 years. So that'll be 2113.
00:40:53 --> 00:40:59 Based on your historical examination, is there any way that the gap can be closed sooner?
00:41:00 --> 00:41:04 And can reparations help reduce that racial wealth gap?
00:41:05 --> 00:41:09 Yes and yes. And so 15 cents on a dollar is a brilliant book.
00:41:09 --> 00:41:14 And it does the hard work of looking at grassroots efforts in Atlanta,
00:41:14 --> 00:41:20 in and around Atlanta, to try and address the mechanisms that perpetuate and
00:41:20 --> 00:41:22 extend wealth inequality.
00:41:22 --> 00:41:26 So I would encourage everyone to read the story 15 cents.
00:41:26 --> 00:41:30 But yes, the yes and yes. So we can as a nation do this.
00:41:30 --> 00:41:36 We have done it. But hidden in the details, which 15 cents on the dollar mentions
00:41:36 --> 00:41:38 and the plunder of Black America mentions,
00:41:39 --> 00:41:46 is that in large part, this racial wealth gap today is a creation of public policy.
00:41:46 --> 00:41:53 So if we go back to the dawn of the mortgage lending industry in the early 20th
00:41:53 --> 00:41:56 century and the discriminatory framework in which that took place,
00:41:56 --> 00:42:02 if we look at the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, the GI Bill,
00:42:02 --> 00:42:07 and how that distributed benefits differently to black and white veterans,
00:42:07 --> 00:42:10 we can see the origins of much of that wealth gap today.
00:42:10 --> 00:42:15 And so the question that the plunder of Black America poses is,
00:42:15 --> 00:42:19 if the damage is financial, shouldn't the remedy be financial as well?
00:42:19 --> 00:42:20 And I think the answer is yes.
00:42:21 --> 00:42:27 And so what we should do is to take an account of that. California did this a few years ago.
00:42:28 --> 00:42:34 Studied the racial wealth and income gaps in California and proposed solutions.
00:42:34 --> 00:42:38 I doubt the politicians are going to act on those proposals.
00:42:38 --> 00:42:44 But one of the things that the California study found was that when they went and quantified it,
00:42:45 --> 00:42:52 they found that the typical Californian had lost about $160 in property
00:42:52 --> 00:42:56 value based on discriminatory practices in California,
00:42:56 --> 00:43:01 a state that did not allow slavery under its 1850 constitution.
00:43:01 --> 00:43:06 So yes, I think we can take those numbers and form an action plan.
00:43:06 --> 00:43:09 Let's start to do the accounting. Let's look at those receipts.
00:43:09 --> 00:43:13 Let's see what we can do to close that gap.
00:43:14 --> 00:43:19 And if scholars like Sandy Darity have proposed cash payments,
00:43:19 --> 00:43:25 this would do a very immediate, that was very immediately accomplished closing some of those gaps.
00:43:26 --> 00:43:29 But in this book, what about if we go back to South Carolina and say,
00:43:29 --> 00:43:34 well, for a long, long time, South Carolina very deliberately discriminated
00:43:34 --> 00:43:36 against Black students.
00:43:36 --> 00:43:40 They spent three times as much on each white student as each Black student.
00:43:40 --> 00:43:44 And for the Rivers family, by the second generation of freedom,
00:43:44 --> 00:43:49 they didn't even have high schools available in Berkeley County for Black students,
00:43:49 --> 00:43:52 in most places in Berkeley County, unless you can somehow get to Charleston.
00:43:52 --> 00:43:57 So why don't we set up scholarship funds? Why don't we set up scholarship funds
00:43:57 --> 00:44:00 to places like the University of South Carolina? Or in Arizona,
00:44:00 --> 00:44:04 there was discrimination against African American students until the 1950s.
00:44:04 --> 00:44:05 And then why discrimination?
00:44:06 --> 00:44:10 Let's look at those specific financial harms and then remedy those harms.
00:44:11 --> 00:44:15 So when we think about the Servicemen's Readjustment Act or the GI Bill,
00:44:16 --> 00:44:21 this didn't have any racist language in the actual bill.
00:44:21 --> 00:44:27 But what it did was to allow local agents to steer black or white vets to different opportunities.
00:44:28 --> 00:44:31 So let's say you're in Pennsylvania.
00:44:31 --> 00:44:38 You're a white vet coming home from World War II. You're meeting with your VA person.
00:44:38 --> 00:44:42 And I don't know if it was called the VA at the time. it's now the Veterans
00:44:42 --> 00:44:46 Administration, that VA agent says, hey, you know, you look like a profile of
00:44:46 --> 00:44:50 someone who should go to Penn and earn an engineering degree. Okay.
00:44:51 --> 00:44:54 Federal government will help you out with that. Black vet comes in,
00:44:54 --> 00:44:55 same office, same officer.
00:44:56 --> 00:45:00 You look like you'd be a great candidate for a veterans masonry school.
00:45:00 --> 00:45:05 Okay. Off you go to the vet's masonry school. The family that has the engineering
00:45:05 --> 00:45:08 degree and the family that has a mason's degree, first of all,
00:45:08 --> 00:45:10 both get federal benefits, right?
00:45:11 --> 00:45:13 So that's objectively better than not having those benefits,
00:45:13 --> 00:45:17 but you can fill in the gaps as to what the trajectory of that is.
00:45:17 --> 00:45:23 In South Carolina, you did not have, the University of South Carolina actually
00:45:23 --> 00:45:28 integrated in the reconstruction era, and then it's segregated,
00:45:28 --> 00:45:31 not to integrate again for another hundred years.
00:45:31 --> 00:45:35 And so there's a big history of that discrimination that we need to address.
00:45:36 --> 00:45:41 So it takes a lot of political will, but I think at first it takes a recognition
00:45:41 --> 00:45:49 that these, what the book calls structural obstacles, are not simply ephemeral, right?
00:45:51 --> 00:45:55 They're something we need to reckon with, and we need to reckon with them by
00:45:55 --> 00:46:00 understanding how they're made and how we can start to remove them.
00:46:00 --> 00:46:03 Because in the story of the 20th century, the story of the first part of the
00:46:03 --> 00:46:09 20th century, the first three quarters of it is creating wealth for white families
00:46:09 --> 00:46:12 and largely excluding black families. Yeah.
00:46:13 --> 00:46:17 All right. So if people want to get this book, again, it's called The Plunder
00:46:17 --> 00:46:22 of Black America, How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made. Where can they get it?
00:46:23 --> 00:46:28 And how can they get in touch with you? So I work at Arizona State University.
00:46:29 --> 00:46:34 So if you just Google Schermerhorn, S-C-H-E-R-M-E-R-H-O-R-N,
00:46:35 --> 00:46:37 ASU, my profile will pop up.
00:46:38 --> 00:46:41 They can buy this book, Barnes & Noble.
00:46:41 --> 00:46:45 They might have to order it. The Barnes & Noble in Springfield,
00:46:45 --> 00:46:49 Virginia has copies, I think, at last look, but the ones near me don't.
00:46:49 --> 00:46:53 So you can, you know, get it or get a used copy or through your local bookstore.
00:46:55 --> 00:47:00 Okay. Well, Calvin Schirmerhorn, I really appreciate, one, you writing this book.
00:47:01 --> 00:47:06 I would make the argument that if I was an attorney, I would use that as evidence
00:47:06 --> 00:47:10 to file lawsuits against certain,
00:47:10 --> 00:47:17 because you outlined certain companies and how they benefited from racism and slavery and all that.
00:47:17 --> 00:47:23 And, you know, but I think it's a good read for people to understand,
00:47:23 --> 00:47:25 because a lot of people make the arguments.
00:47:25 --> 00:47:30 Well, I don't understand about reparations and why I got to pay or,
00:47:30 --> 00:47:33 you know, we weren't involved with slavery and all that.
00:47:33 --> 00:47:41 But, you know, the plunder of black America makes the case as to how we got to this point.
00:47:43 --> 00:47:47 And hopefully learning from that will lead to some resolution.
00:47:47 --> 00:47:49 So I thank you for doing that.
00:47:49 --> 00:47:52 And I thank you for coming on the podcast.
00:47:53 --> 00:47:55 Well, thank you, Mr. Fleming. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.
00:47:56 --> 00:47:58 All right, guys. And we're going to catch y'all on the other side.
00:48:20 --> 00:48:25 All right, and we are back. So I just want to thank Dr.
00:48:25 --> 00:48:34 Calvin Schermerhorn for writing this incredible book, The Plunder of Black America.
00:48:35 --> 00:48:44 And like I told him in the interview, this book makes the case.
00:48:44 --> 00:48:47 We also mentioned another book, 15 Cents on the Dollar.
00:48:49 --> 00:48:53 That Louise Story and Ebony Reed put together.
00:48:54 --> 00:48:59 And between those two books, you can make the case for reparations.
00:48:59 --> 00:49:06 You can make the case for public policy to do better as it relates to African-Americans.
00:49:06 --> 00:49:08 It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or Republican.
00:49:08 --> 00:49:12 You need to read those books, especially if you're an elected official.
00:49:12 --> 00:49:18 You need to read these books because when people tell you they're struggling, And it's real.
00:49:18 --> 00:49:22 And it's been real for black people for a long, long time.
00:49:23 --> 00:49:29 So I really, really was honored to find this book and to be able to get the author on.
00:49:31 --> 00:49:37 And, you know, he's a college professor, so I did my best to get him out in
00:49:37 --> 00:49:40 time to do what he had to do as far as school was concerned.
00:49:41 --> 00:49:47 But I'm glad he took the time to do that. So I would be remiss personally if
00:49:47 --> 00:49:52 I didn't say something about Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr.
00:49:53 --> 00:50:02 He played a major role in my life without necessarily being me being a protege
00:50:02 --> 00:50:05 of his or being an apprentice or whatever term you want to use.
00:50:05 --> 00:50:11 But, you know, I mean, he was a part of growing up in Chicago.
00:50:11 --> 00:50:19 He was a part of our culture. He was part of the reason why I say growing up as a black man,
00:50:19 --> 00:50:27 a black child in Chicago during that time from 65 to 83 was was an incredible experience.
00:50:27 --> 00:50:33 I wouldn't trade that for anything in the world, you know, any other city or
00:50:33 --> 00:50:35 any other part of the United States.
00:50:35 --> 00:50:43 And he was the embodiment of why we had this particular pride.
00:50:44 --> 00:50:46 He was kind of the metronome.
00:50:47 --> 00:50:52 As far as us understanding Black history and pride and all that.
00:50:53 --> 00:50:57 And see, Chicago has been, you know, all these people used to talk about Harlem
00:50:57 --> 00:51:01 and people talk about Watts and, you know, all these other places.
00:51:01 --> 00:51:05 But Bronzeville and Chicago and just the city of Chicago in general,
00:51:05 --> 00:51:09 the South Side, you know, no offense to my West Side friends because,
00:51:10 --> 00:51:11 you know, there's some solid people there too.
00:51:11 --> 00:51:21 But the South Side of Chicago really was, like I said during that time, just a good place to be.
00:51:22 --> 00:51:27 You know, there were some people experiencing poverty and other problems and all that.
00:51:27 --> 00:51:31 But they were people that were, even if they were struggling,
00:51:31 --> 00:51:35 they had pride in their families.
00:51:35 --> 00:51:38 They carried themselves a certain way.
00:51:40 --> 00:51:46 And, you know, they knew how to survive. And there were people like Reverend
00:51:46 --> 00:51:51 Jackson out there that was constantly preaching about hope and organizing and all that.
00:51:51 --> 00:51:55 I mean, Barack Obama was organizing during that time.
00:51:55 --> 00:52:00 I mean, it was just, you know, we elected our first black mayor during that time period.
00:52:00 --> 00:52:03 I mean, it was just, it was just different. And like I said,
00:52:03 --> 00:52:06 Reverend Jackson was, whenever something was going down,
00:52:07 --> 00:52:12 you know, But his presence was always around us, almost like the Nation of Islam
00:52:12 --> 00:52:16 and their presence during that time in Chicago.
00:52:16 --> 00:52:20 You know, when I was growing up, Elijah Muhammad was still alive,
00:52:20 --> 00:52:25 you know, and Mosque Miriam was right there on South Chicago.
00:52:25 --> 00:52:32 And, you know, it wasn't any big deal for us to go to, you know,
00:52:32 --> 00:52:38 the Shabazz Bakery or whatever to get some bread or, you know, bean pies or whatever.
00:52:39 --> 00:52:43 Muhammad Speaks was the paper then. It wasn't the final call at that point,
00:52:43 --> 00:52:45 but it eventually became the final call.
00:52:46 --> 00:52:52 And headquarters was literally like walking distance from my house, right?
00:52:53 --> 00:52:57 Operation Breadbasket, when it first started in Chicago, Reverend Jackson's
00:52:57 --> 00:53:01 organization or the offshoot at SCLC that Dr.
00:53:01 --> 00:53:05 King put him over, had taken over to Old Capitol Theater, which was right there
00:53:05 --> 00:53:07 on Halstead Street, close to my house.
00:53:07 --> 00:53:15 And before he left the organization and started Operation Push,
00:53:15 --> 00:53:20 which then became the Push Rainbow Coalition, right?
00:53:21 --> 00:53:27 But, you know, I was a part of the Push Excel program.
00:53:27 --> 00:53:31 So that was a group of young leaders that were chosen.
00:53:33 --> 00:53:39 And, you know, we would meet and strategize and workshop and all that stuff,
00:53:39 --> 00:53:41 you know, like once a month.
00:53:41 --> 00:53:46 And he would always, you know, they would feed us and he would always,
00:53:46 --> 00:53:52 if he could, he would always come and give us a word of encouragement for what we were doing.
00:53:52 --> 00:53:58 So, you know, and of course, this is before cell phones and selfies and all that.
00:53:58 --> 00:54:05 So, So, you know, what I have is memories as opposed to snapshots, right?
00:54:06 --> 00:54:12 And then, you know, going to Jackson State, he came to Jackson State many times to speak.
00:54:12 --> 00:54:16 You know, it was an honor and privilege for me as a student body president to
00:54:16 --> 00:54:22 be on the dais with him, to introduce him, to speak to the student body president.
00:54:23 --> 00:54:28 You know, have lunch with him and, you know, just interact with him.
00:54:28 --> 00:54:32 And then, of course, being an elected official, whenever he came to Mississippi,
00:54:33 --> 00:54:36 you know, we, members of the Black Caucus, we interacted with him.
00:54:37 --> 00:54:45 And I remember one time we had to, we went to Atlanta,
00:54:45 --> 00:54:50 we came to Atlanta to march for an extension of the Voting Rights Act,
00:54:50 --> 00:54:53 and he was kind of the lead on that.
00:54:53 --> 00:54:59 But, you know, my memory of that was sitting in the old press box of the Morris
00:54:59 --> 00:55:01 Brown Football Stadium,
00:55:01 --> 00:55:09 and it was him and myself and Representative Jim Evans and Reverend James Orange
00:55:09 --> 00:55:13 and Reverend Joseph Lowry and Dr. Andrew Young.
00:55:14 --> 00:55:17 And I was just in awe just listening to them tell stories.
00:55:18 --> 00:55:23 You know, about different events that happened, you know, those kind of things.
00:55:24 --> 00:55:27 And so, you know, I know people...
00:55:28 --> 00:55:33 You know, there's always negative stuff that's out there. And people said that
00:55:33 --> 00:55:34 certain folks didn't get along.
00:55:35 --> 00:55:45 But, you know, those guys had an incredible bond that is so unique because all
00:55:45 --> 00:55:47 of those guys came up around Dr.
00:55:48 --> 00:55:58 King directly or indirectly. And, you know, just to see those original founders
00:55:58 --> 00:56:02 of the SCLC just gathered in that moment, right?
00:56:03 --> 00:56:07 Those were just the kind of things. And then, you know, over time and over years,
00:56:07 --> 00:56:15 and there's one incredibly funny story, you know, when he was running for president in 88,
00:56:16 --> 00:56:22 and I was working for a congressional candidate at the time,
00:56:22 --> 00:56:26 and he had made it to the runoff.
00:56:26 --> 00:56:32 And his opponent had done a commercial where he took a soundbite from Reverend
00:56:32 --> 00:56:36 Jackson and made it seem like Reverend Jackson was endorsing him.
00:56:36 --> 00:56:42 And so one of the guys who was supporting my candidate said,
00:56:42 --> 00:56:47 well, look, we need to get Reverend Jackson to come on and fix that.
00:56:49 --> 00:56:51 So here we are. I'm in this guy's office.
00:56:53 --> 00:56:57 It's like easily like one
00:56:57 --> 00:57:00 one or two in the morning and we're
00:57:00 --> 00:57:07 trying to reach reverend jackson and we get him and he was clearly hoarse from
00:57:07 --> 00:57:13 speaking and all that like i said they had just won the michigan caucus and
00:57:13 --> 00:57:18 you know when we told him what was going on he was like oh no doc We can't have that.
00:57:19 --> 00:57:23 And, you know, and he started, he said, what can we do and all this stuff?
00:57:23 --> 00:57:26 And so, like, literally, like, the next day.
00:57:27 --> 00:57:36 Went to a recording studio and he called in and basically did a spot over the telephone.
00:57:39 --> 00:57:47 To put a disclaimer on, you know, let people know that he wasn't endorsing our opponent, right?
00:57:47 --> 00:57:50 But that's how engaged he was.
00:57:50 --> 00:57:54 But those are my personal stories and recollections.
00:57:55 --> 00:58:00 But the beauty of Reverend Jackson was the fact that as I was talking to relatives
00:58:00 --> 00:58:09 and friends and looking at different people that I follow or follow me on social media and stuff,
00:58:10 --> 00:58:16 it was just like, you know, the younger folks that were able to get the selfies with him, right?
00:58:16 --> 00:58:24 And, you know, my cousin, he went to college with Jesse Jr. So he had met Reverend Jackson that way.
00:58:26 --> 00:58:29 And, you know, talking about Kyle's roommate, and he was talking about,
00:58:30 --> 00:58:37 you know, how his dad, you know, gave Jesse, Reverend Jackson, the frat shake,
00:58:38 --> 00:58:41 you know, because they, you know, he was a proud Omega man.
00:58:42 --> 00:58:49 And, you know, just the memory of that. And, you know, and then the first time
00:58:49 --> 00:58:51 he came to Jackson State, we had a march.
00:58:52 --> 00:58:56 And my roommate got to meet him and, you know, was telling me,
00:58:56 --> 00:58:59 yeah, you met my dad and da-da-da. He was like, yeah, okay.
00:59:00 --> 00:59:05 Yeah, old frat brother of mine, okay. Yeah, he was trying to recruit my roommate
00:59:05 --> 00:59:06 into the frat at that point.
00:59:06 --> 00:59:10 But it's just those stories and those pictures and it's always,
00:59:10 --> 00:59:15 you know, just the joy that people had being in his presence.
00:59:16 --> 00:59:20 I'm old enough to remember the Sesame Street episode he was on.
00:59:20 --> 00:59:27 I remember him doing the green eggs and ham on Saturday Night Live and all that stuff. And.
00:59:28 --> 00:59:37 You know, the ultimate testimony for Reverend Jackson was the fact that he was
00:59:37 --> 00:59:39 serious about the business, right?
00:59:40 --> 00:59:44 Whether he was, I even had to cover him as a reporter, right?
00:59:44 --> 00:59:54 When he came down to speak as a stockholder of MCI World Cup when Bernie Ebers was running it and,
00:59:54 --> 01:00:00 you know, and is trying to get more minority participation in the company and
01:00:00 --> 01:00:05 trying to encourage black people at that time to buy stocks.
01:00:06 --> 01:00:11 Because his whole contribution to the movement,
01:00:11 --> 01:00:16 not was just the political gains that he made because of what he did running
01:00:16 --> 01:00:19 for president of the United States,
01:00:19 --> 01:00:26 created the mechanism where a Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Kamala Harris
01:00:26 --> 01:00:30 could win the nomination because the primaries used to be winner take all.
01:00:30 --> 01:00:37 And because of Reverend Jackson and his campaign, they changed it to proportions.
01:00:38 --> 01:00:46 So it used to be if you won, let's say in Mississippi, you got 51% of the vote,
01:00:46 --> 01:00:52 the opponent got 49, you would get 100% of the delegates.
01:00:52 --> 01:01:00 After Reverend Jackson, it was like 51% of the delegates went to you and 49%
01:01:00 --> 01:01:01 went to your opponent, right?
01:01:02 --> 01:01:06 And that's how you were, you know, those delegates were chosen at the state
01:01:06 --> 01:01:10 convention and then they got to go represent those particular candidates at
01:01:10 --> 01:01:11 the national convention,
01:01:12 --> 01:01:18 and that's how you determine who wins instead of all the deal-making and backroom
01:01:18 --> 01:01:22 brokering that used to happen in previous conventions, right?
01:01:24 --> 01:01:32 So, he was, but getting back to my point about the joy and stuff,
01:01:33 --> 01:01:35 he just, everywhere he went,
01:01:36 --> 01:01:40 especially in the black community, every time he spoke and all that,
01:01:41 --> 01:01:44 you know, people were glad to see him.
01:01:44 --> 01:01:48 When he spoke up about something, people were excited.
01:01:49 --> 01:01:54 It raised the antenna. If Reverend Jackson offered an opinion,
01:01:54 --> 01:01:58 it's like, that's something we need to be paying attention to, right?
01:01:58 --> 01:02:01 I mean, that was the kind of magnitude he had.
01:02:01 --> 01:02:06 And, you know, even the fact that he was able to go overseas and get people.
01:02:07 --> 01:02:11 I remember that cover Jet Magazine when he got that brother,
01:02:11 --> 01:02:14 Robert Goodman. He was a POW.
01:02:15 --> 01:02:21 And we was a hostage actually because we weren't at war at the time and he got
01:02:21 --> 01:02:22 that brother to come home.
01:02:22 --> 01:02:26 I think he was in Syria if I remember correctly. I can't recall right off,
01:02:27 --> 01:02:30 but I remember Brother Goodman because I remember that cover,
01:02:30 --> 01:02:32 Reverend Jackson in his suit.
01:02:34 --> 01:02:39 And Brother Goodman in his naval uniform standing side by side,
01:02:39 --> 01:02:41 well, walking side by side.
01:02:41 --> 01:02:47 That was just incredible. And he was one of those forgotten people.
01:02:47 --> 01:02:53 You know, it was just like, well, not forgotten, but there wasn't any movement going on.
01:02:53 --> 01:02:56 And then Reverend Jackson got wind of it and was able to get him out.
01:02:56 --> 01:02:59 So, you know, he had a cachet.
01:02:59 --> 01:03:02 He had a aura and a presence.
01:03:03 --> 01:03:10 And the greatest testimony was just to see all my friends and colleagues and
01:03:10 --> 01:03:14 all that stuff be able to share their personal experience with him.
01:03:15 --> 01:03:19 And that's a true man of the people, right?
01:03:19 --> 01:03:28 Whereas like in your little circle, I promise you, if you're black and you probably
01:03:28 --> 01:03:29 had those conversations,
01:03:30 --> 01:03:33 you know, People say, oh, yeah, I remember when he came to our church.
01:03:33 --> 01:03:35 I remember when he came to our neighborhood.
01:03:35 --> 01:03:38 I remember when he spoke at this event, you know.
01:03:38 --> 01:03:43 Most of us have that story because he was truly for us.
01:03:44 --> 01:03:50 And, you know, again, the naysayers will say certain things about him.
01:03:50 --> 01:03:55 You know, he caught a lot of flack while he was alive. But one of my favorite
01:03:55 --> 01:03:58 quotes is something that stuck with me the whole time,
01:03:58 --> 01:04:07 along with a politician thinks of the next election, but a statesman thinks of the next generation.
01:04:07 --> 01:04:12 That's my favorite political quote. But my second favorite political quote is
01:04:12 --> 01:04:18 from Reverend Jackson. He said, I'm a public servant, not a perfect servant, right?
01:04:19 --> 01:04:25 All of us are human. All of us make mistakes. All of us have hurt somebody one
01:04:25 --> 01:04:27 way or the other, physically, emotionally, whatever.
01:04:28 --> 01:04:32 All of us have disappointed somebody that cares about us, right?
01:04:32 --> 01:04:35 So we've all fallen short.
01:04:36 --> 01:04:46 And, you know, but the totality of your life should reflect that you made a difference,
01:04:47 --> 01:04:52 that you helped somebody along the way, that you uplifted folks.
01:04:52 --> 01:04:55 And in the case of Reverend Jackson, uplifted the people.
01:04:56 --> 01:04:59 Right. And I think that's important.
01:05:00 --> 01:05:04 And that's the distinction I have. Right.
01:05:04 --> 01:05:10 You can't draw a better distinction than, you know, Reverend Jackson and the
01:05:10 --> 01:05:15 current president, because it's like, yeah, there's some people that's happy
01:05:15 --> 01:05:17 to see the current president and all that, but...
01:05:18 --> 01:05:25 And it's not the same, you know, whereas if Reverend Jackson made a mistake,
01:05:25 --> 01:05:29 there was some attrition to that. Right.
01:05:29 --> 01:05:36 There was there was, you know, there was a healing process. There was a way
01:05:36 --> 01:05:42 for him to pull from his gospel training to reconcile with people.
01:05:43 --> 01:05:47 And he always, always worked out different things. As a matter of fact,
01:05:48 --> 01:05:53 the quote that you heard me recite with Dr.
01:05:53 --> 01:05:59 Schumerhorn was not from a speech he gave to black folks, but an interview he
01:05:59 --> 01:06:07 gave to the American Enterprise Institute, which is basically a conservative think tank.
01:06:07 --> 01:06:16 So he was talking to some reporters and, you know, Republican policymakers.
01:06:16 --> 01:06:23 You know, Robert Woodson is one of the OGs as far as black conservatism in America,
01:06:23 --> 01:06:27 but he had a positive relationship with Reverend Jackson and asked Reverend
01:06:27 --> 01:06:31 Jackson to come to that meeting to talk to that group,
01:06:32 --> 01:06:39 right, and make the case for black economic equity to them.
01:06:40 --> 01:06:47 So he was never afraid to go anywhere to fight for us, right?
01:06:47 --> 01:06:54 And no matter what some people thought of him or, you know, how judgmental people
01:06:54 --> 01:06:55 got when he made a mistake.
01:06:57 --> 01:07:01 And that is not the definition of his life.
01:07:01 --> 01:07:05 And that shouldn't be the definition of anybody's life, right?
01:07:06 --> 01:07:13 If you continue to build your legacy on your mistakes, well,
01:07:13 --> 01:07:14 that's a different conversation.
01:07:14 --> 01:07:19 And so when people ask me, well, why do you not like the current president?
01:07:19 --> 01:07:24 It's because he doesn't have any empathy.
01:07:24 --> 01:07:29 He doesn't have any attrition. He doesn't care about anybody but himself.
01:07:29 --> 01:07:32 And Reverend Jackson was the total opposite of that.
01:07:33 --> 01:07:41 And so that's why people are mourning his loss, even though they,
01:07:41 --> 01:07:44 you know, he was not the same man he was 20 years ago.
01:07:45 --> 01:07:50 You know, we knew that he was sick and all that stuff, but that doesn't matter.
01:07:50 --> 01:07:55 You know, the world was a better place because he was still in it. Right.
01:07:56 --> 01:08:00 And so even if he couldn't do the things that he used to do,
01:08:01 --> 01:08:05 just the knowledge of the fact that he was still around was comforting.
01:08:06 --> 01:08:10 And some people may not get that. You know, that's fine.
01:08:12 --> 01:08:13 But now...
01:08:14 --> 01:08:17 That we are in a grieving moment.
01:08:17 --> 01:08:22 And there's some people that are upset because he's saying he's not going to
01:08:22 --> 01:08:25 lay in the state of the Capitol and not flag at half-mast.
01:08:25 --> 01:08:30 Look, don't expect things from people that don't care about you,
01:08:31 --> 01:08:32 right? That don't respect you.
01:08:33 --> 01:08:36 Let's not dwell on that.
01:08:36 --> 01:08:43 What we need to dwell on is what he strove for, what Reverend Jackson was all
01:08:43 --> 01:08:46 about, which was building us up,
01:08:46 --> 01:08:54 not just as full citizens as far as being able to vote and public accommodations
01:08:54 --> 01:08:58 and all those things, but as far as building our wealth.
01:08:58 --> 01:09:02 And I just thought that the timing of Dr.
01:09:02 --> 01:09:08 Shermerhorn coming on while we're in this mourning period was so apropos because
01:09:08 --> 01:09:12 this is what Reverend Jackson fought for. He wanted us.
01:09:12 --> 01:09:20 And it was Dr. King's vision, you know, and he asked Reverend Jackson to lead that part of the vision.
01:09:21 --> 01:09:25 To build our economic base.
01:09:27 --> 01:09:33 Because it's like 15 cents on a dollar ain't going to cut it. It's just not.
01:09:33 --> 01:09:38 You know, $5 for every $100, that's not going to cut it.
01:09:39 --> 01:09:49 We have to continue to push, fight, protest, whatever we have to do to build
01:09:49 --> 01:09:52 Black wealth in this nation.
01:09:52 --> 01:09:57 And it doesn't matter how many Black folks they are in the country.
01:09:57 --> 01:10:00 What matters is the dollars.
01:10:01 --> 01:10:04 And we have it, in a sense.
01:10:04 --> 01:10:11 We have incredible spending power, but we don't have accumulated wealth.
01:10:12 --> 01:10:15 And that makes all the difference, right?
01:10:15 --> 01:10:23 If we were able to have tangible investments like homeownership and stocks and
01:10:23 --> 01:10:25 bonds and all those kind of things,
01:10:26 --> 01:10:30 that's what we need to do, you know.
01:10:31 --> 01:10:34 And it's hard. It's not easy.
01:10:34 --> 01:10:41 I'm a living witness to that. I have, you know, tried to have investments and
01:10:41 --> 01:10:45 all those kind of things just to try to set it up for my child and all that
01:10:45 --> 01:10:47 property, all that kind of stuff.
01:10:48 --> 01:10:50 But being black in America is tough.
01:10:51 --> 01:10:57 And if, you know, any hardship, I think it was either in Dr.
01:10:57 --> 01:11:02 Schirmerhorn's book or somewhere I was reading, it was like a black family is
01:11:02 --> 01:11:05 one sneeze away from being bankrupt. Right.
01:11:05 --> 01:11:09 Right. The one lady that he talked about and that we were talking about,
01:11:10 --> 01:11:14 this Miss Prather, Rachel Prather, she, like I said, she was an engineer.
01:11:14 --> 01:11:19 She had a car accident and it changed her whole life.
01:11:20 --> 01:11:26 It just the income, the steady job that she had and all that was gone just because of a car wreck.
01:11:26 --> 01:11:33 Her economic future was in peril because of a car accident. right?
01:11:34 --> 01:11:38 That's a tenuous situation. And it's not just Black people in America that are
01:11:38 --> 01:11:41 suffering, but that's who I'm focusing on now.
01:11:42 --> 01:11:47 So, you know, Reverend Jackson, that's what he was pushing for.
01:11:47 --> 01:11:52 And we're seeing a lot of people who, again, were not direct protégés of him
01:11:52 --> 01:11:57 or contemporaries, but they're doing the work.
01:11:57 --> 01:12:04 And so we need to support those people that are carrying that vision on and
01:12:04 --> 01:12:12 really figure out a way to make that a reality for us, you know.
01:12:13 --> 01:12:19 And I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but if we really want to honor Reverend
01:12:19 --> 01:12:26 Jackson, then all of us need to work toward that goal, right?
01:12:26 --> 01:12:35 And the way we do that is through public policy, which means that we got to
01:12:35 --> 01:12:40 elect people that understand that, that buy into that, right?
01:12:42 --> 01:12:46 There's a candidate, young man, John Ossoff, who's running for re-election in the U.S.
01:12:46 --> 01:12:52 Senate, and he's already basically coined this phrase Epstein class, right?
01:12:54 --> 01:12:59 And that's who our battle is against. So it doesn't matter if there's black
01:12:59 --> 01:13:03 folks in the Epstein class or there's white folks in Epstein or Latinos.
01:13:04 --> 01:13:09 You're part of the Epstein class. Your mindset is that you keep all the wealth
01:13:09 --> 01:13:11 and the rest of us have to fend for ourselves.
01:13:12 --> 01:13:19 If you've seen science fiction movies like Elysium or The Island or anything
01:13:19 --> 01:13:24 like that where people are perverse with their wealth or you read books like
01:13:24 --> 01:13:29 1984 where Big Brother's dictating to you what's happening.
01:13:30 --> 01:13:36 That's what defines the Epstein class. Those are the people that we are fighting, right? Right.
01:13:36 --> 01:13:42 So, you know, those hundred people that showed up at the White House for Black
01:13:42 --> 01:13:46 History Month, if you're part of that class, if that's what you want,
01:13:46 --> 01:13:47 then we're fighting you, too.
01:13:48 --> 01:13:53 It's nothing personal. I'm not going to tell you a sellout or a coon or anything
01:13:53 --> 01:13:55 like that. I'm just going to fight you.
01:13:56 --> 01:14:03 Right. Because the survival for the rest of us depends on us defeating the person you're supporting.
01:14:04 --> 01:14:07 That's just facts. Again, it's not personal.
01:14:08 --> 01:14:13 It's just where we are right now. You know, I don't have time to call you a name.
01:14:13 --> 01:14:19 I do have the energy, though, to do what I can to get people to vote against
01:14:19 --> 01:14:21 the guy that you support. Right?
01:14:22 --> 01:14:29 That's just the reality of where we are. And so, you know, again,
01:14:29 --> 01:14:36 if we want to honor Reverend Jackson, then let's fight for what we deserve.
01:14:38 --> 01:14:44 And what we deserve is to live life in America and live it abundantly.
01:14:45 --> 01:14:52 We deserve our pursuit of happiness, right? We deserve our seat at the table.
01:14:53 --> 01:14:57 I know Ms. Shirley Chisholm said, you know, if they don't offer your seat,
01:14:57 --> 01:14:59 bring a folding chair. That's all well and good.
01:15:00 --> 01:15:05 But we deserve a seat at the table. And it's time.
01:15:07 --> 01:15:14 And so I'll end it on that. I greatly appreciate y'all for listening and until next time.